by Jeff Shelby
He made it sound like the wind was a thief who’d broken in and stolen something.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you staying in a tent?”
“I didn’t have anywhere else to stay. This isn’t exactly Vegas.”
He had a good point. Latney didn’t have any lodging available and Shawn wasn’t from here so he wouldn’t have anyone to stay with. Even though Vivian knew him, she never would have welcomed him into her home, and I was pretty sure her dad wouldn’t have, either.
“So you’re just camped out in some field?” I narrowed my eyes. “Whose property are you on? Do they know you’re there?”
His gaze shifted from me to the ground. He stared at a puddle, watching as the last of the rain hit the surface, sending ripples out.
“I think it’s abandoned, “ he said. “There’s a house, but it’s been dark the whole time I’ve been here. And I made sure to camp far away from it. I’m basically on the edge of the woods, right near the road here. I don’t even know if that area belongs to them.”
I didn’t think any acreage in Latney was unclaimed. “That’s illegal.”
“Only if they have No Trespassing signs posted,” he said.
I didn’t know if this was true or not, so I didn’t answer. Instead, I asked, “Is this why you wouldn’t tell me where you were staying? When I asked you the other morning?”
He hesitated, then nodded. “Honestly, I didn’t think I’d still be here, though. I just want to find Leslie and get out of here.” His eyes returned to me, his eyebrows raised, his expression hopeful. “You haven’t seen her, have you? Heard anything about her?”
“No,” I said coolly, folding my arms across my chest. “But I did see someone else.”
He waited, the look on his face changing to one of confusion.
I played my trump card. “Tori,” I told him, reciting the name the girl had entered into my phone. “Tori Wilkes.”
The color drained from his face. “Who?”
“Tori.” And then I added, “Your girlfriend.”
He blinked a couple of times, then licked his lips. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Brunette, pretty,” I said, rattling off her features. “Pale complexion, dark eyeliner. She seemed pretty interested in finding out where you are.”
He muttered something under his breath. Then, louder, he said, “She’s not my girlfriend.”
“No?” I frowned. “She told me otherwise. And since you haven’t been in the habit of being entirely honest with me, I’m thinking I’m going to take her word over yours.”
He made a sound that was half-sigh, half-groan. “It’s not what you think. It’s not as bad as you think.”
I actually chuckled. “Try me.”
“Tori isn’t my girlfriend.” He wiped at his hair again. It was beginning to dry a little, returning to its familiar blond color. “I mean, technically, I guess she is because we never broke up. But I was going to, I swear.”
“What, a year ago?” I asked, snorting in disgust. “Isn’t that how long you and Leslie have been together?”
His cheeks flushed. “Well, yeah, we’ve been together for a while. But we’ve had some problems, you know? And…and Tori was there when I needed her. When Leslie and I were on a break.”
A break. I tried not to roll my eyes. “How long ago was that?”
“Not long,” he said. “But then Leslie and I made up and I stopped seeing Tori right away. Scout’s honor.” He looked at me solemnly. “And I didn’t call her or text her, either.”
“But did you ever break up with her?”
“I…I thought she would get the hint.”
So he was a coward, a two-timer, and a liar. “I guess she didn’t,” I said, “because she’s here in town, looking for you. Thinking you’re two-timing her.”
“I’m not!”
“You sort of are, Shawn,” I said. “Because if you never broke up with her, she thinks you’re still together.”
He cradled his head in his hands and groaned. “Ugh,” he said. I did a double take. He actually said ‘ugh’ as though it were a real word. “This wasn’t part of the plan.”
I perked up, leveling my gaze on him. “Plan? What plan?”
“The plan,” he repeated. His voice was muffled, his hands still covering his mouth.
“You’ll need to be more specific.”
He dropped his hands and looked at me. “The plan to get money from Leslie’s dad.”
TWENTY FIVE
“What?”
My mouth was open. Wide open. Had Shawn just admitted to kidnapping Leslie for a ransom?
He stared at me. “Money. We needed money.”
“You and Leslie?” I swallowed. My pulse was racing and I wondered just what I was getting myself into, cornering a man who apparently was admitting that he had kidnapped his girlfriend for money.
“Yeah.”
I swallowed again. My palms were wet; from perspiration, not rain. I wiped them on my pants. “So…you kidnapped her? To get money from her stepdad?”
His expression changed. His eyes widened and his jaw dropped. “What? No, of course not! That’s insane.”
“But you just said you needed money…”
“I did. I do.” He was shaking his head. “But I didn’t kidnap her! Why would I do that?”
I felt like Captain Obvious: if he needed money and planned to get it from Leslie’s dad, what other explanation was there?
“She came to town to ask him for some,” he said. “We pretended to be broken up. She thought her stepdad might be more sympathetic—and more generous—if he thought I wasn’t around.”
My theory fizzled. “Oh. So Leslie was in on it, too?”
Shawn nodded. “That’s why she came back to town in the first place. For money.”
So Vivian had a right to be suspicious. Everything she’d said about Leslie was true. I fought the irritation welling up inside of me.
“And you were fully aware? Of the plan? You were completely in on it?”
“Well, yeah, of course. We needed money and she had a sure thing.”
“What do you need money for?”
He shrugged his shoulders, but I noticed that his gaze dropped again. “Just stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” When he didn’t answer, I said, “You know, I bet the sheriff might be interested in hearing this. And Vivian. And Leslie’s stepdad.”
He held up a hand. “No, wait. It’s…I need it for my dogs.”
“Your dogs?” I repeated.
“Yeah.” He nodded, his pale blue eyes back on me. They were lit with a fire I hadn’t seen before. “See, we started this business. Me and Leslie. We were gonna be dog breeders. We both love dogs and we thought it would be an easy way to make some cash.”
Easy cash and dog breeders were not two things that typically went together. Breeding dogs required space, time, patience and capitol for investment. I was pretty sure Leslie and Shawn possessed none of these things.
“We got some dogs on credit.”
“Credit?”
He nodded. “Yeah, some pugs. A breeder nearby was looking to downsize. We paid her the first hundred for the dogs—we got four of them—and were due to make another payment last month.”
“Let me guess. You missed it.”
“Yeah.”
“So now you need money to pay her or she takes the dogs back.”
“She already took them,” he said, sadly. “Repo’d them a couple weeks ago.”
“She repo’d the dogs?” I repeated.
“Yeah. Sent some dude over to our apartment when we weren’t home. Busted our door in and grabbed the dogs. So now we need to pay the landlord back for the door and score enough cash to get the dogs back.”
I rubbed my temple. His story was just unbelievable enough to be real.
“Did she get the money?” I asked. “From her stepfather?”
Maybe we were lookin
g at a robbery and abduction. If Leslie had managed to withdraw a sizeable amount from the bank and someone had seen her do it, there was the possibility that she had been targeted simply because of that.
There was also the possibility that she’d just decided to grab the money and leave town without Shawn, especially if she’d caught wind of his affair and his nonexistent break-up with Tori.
“No,” he said. “At least I don’t think she did. I know she talked to him, and that he told her he would float her some cash. But that’s the last I heard before…”
Perhaps I needed to have a chat with Leslie and Vivian’s father. The only problem was, I had no idea how to get ahold of him. And no reason to do so. Because I wasn’t a private investigator.
A gust of wind blew across the road and Shawn shivered. Even though his hair was drying, his clothes were still soaked through. I almost felt bad for him. Almost.
The sky had clouded over again, the thin slice of blue visible only moments before now swallowed up by another sea of angry gray orbs. A raindrop fell, a fat one that bounced into a puddle, and then another and another.
I didn’t want to stand out in the rain, but I did want to ask Shawn more questions.
Because I was pretty sure he knew more than he was letting on.
But the wind howled again, this time with a force that whipped my hair about as if it were a flag flying at full mast. I saw a flash of orange lift into the sky and Shawn and I both turned out heads. His tent was airborne, again, lifting like a lopsided, oversized kite.
His eyes grew huge. “Not again!” He took off at a full sprint, splashing through the standing puddles on the road. “Sorry, I gotta go catch my tent,” he called over his shoulder.
He leaped over the shrubs that lined the road with the grace of a hurdler and chased after the mammoth tarp sailing across the field.
As I watched Shawn scramble after his tent, I wondered what else he was chasing.
TWENTY SIX
I wasn’t about to chase after Shawn in the rain, so I did the only thing I could do.
I drove home.
I replayed what he’d told me as I navigated the new deluge.
And promptly got a headache.
Shawn had two girlfriends, not one—because he’d never called it quits with Tori. Not the brightest idea. Buying dogs to breed on credit wasn’t exactly brilliant, either. Shawn was an idiot, and an unethical one, at that, I thought, thinking about his two-timing the girls.
But I wasn’t sure he was a criminal.
Despite his dishonesty with Leslie, he did seem genuinely concerned for her welfare. The fact that he was sticking around town was also a big tip-off. If he’d had something to do with her disappearance, wouldn’t he have hightailed it out of there? The longer he stayed, the more people would notice him. He’d already had interactions with me and with Mikey. Dawn could identify him, and Vivian definitely knew who he was.
But maybe he was doing that on purpose. Maybe that was his clever way of deflection: if he stuck around, why would anyone suspect him? No one in their right mind would hang out in the town where they’d just committed a crime.
Except there was one problem with that train of thought.
I wasn’t sure if Shawn was in his right mind.
I pulled into my driveway, the wipers beating furiously, trying to keep up with the rain splattering the windshield. It was coming down just as relentlessly as before, this time without the thunder and lightning. I sat in the car and thought about waiting it out. I changed my mind quickly, though, when I spotted another car in my driveway.
A white Prius.
Declan Murphy’s car.
I tried to see through the waves of water rolling down the windshield. The headlights were off, and I couldn’t make out anyone seated in the vehicle. I glanced toward my house. Someone was standing on my front porch, pressed up against the side of the house to avoid the rain that was now blowing sideways.
I squinted.
Make that two people. Two people were standing on my porch.
I frowned. Who would Declan have brought over? From what I had seen, he was sort of a loner. Sure, he visited people as an emissary of the church, and he was definitely chatty with people before and after his services, but I couldn’t recall a time that I’d seen him out in public with someone else.
I gauged the distance between where I was parked and the house. And then I tried to determine how much rain was falling and how wet I would potentially get if I decided to make a mad dash for it. And then I decided that it sounded like I was concocting some horrible high school math problem in my head, and that any amount of water was going to be too much but I was too curious as to who was standing on my porch to wait out the rain.
I grabbed my purse, shoved my phone inside it, yanked the keys out of the ignition and opened the door. And ran.
By the time I reached the porch, I was soaked and I knew who was standing next to Declan.
Gunnar Forsythe.
I wiped the loose strands of wet hair out of my eyes. “Well, this is a surprise.”
Neither man said anything.
I felt a touch of alarm. “Is…is everything alright?” Maybe another one of my buildings had burned down, or another body had been discovered. Gunnar was there to break the news and Declan was there to offer support.
“Everything’s fine,” Declan said. His tone was gentle, his eyes warm. “I stopped by to see how you were doing. And to bring you this.” He nudged a paper bag that was sitting by his feet.
“What is it?” I asked, stooping to peer inside.
“Cookies. Snickerdoodles, actually.” He smiled. “I was making some today and remembered how much you like them. Figured I’d bring some by.”
I smiled in response, remembering the ones he’d brought me during my first week in Latney. “That was very thoughtful of you. Thank you.” I scooped up the bag, looping the handles over my forearm.
I glanced up at Gunnar. He was standing to the right of Declan, his arms folded over his chest.
“I did not bring cookies,” he announced.
There was an awkward silence, which I quickly filled by saying, “Well, that’s okay. I have some right here.”
Declan smiled.
Gunnar did not.
“I came to see if you’d like to have dinner with me,” Gunnar said.
I froze.
“But I didn’t realize you already had plans.” He looked at Declan, giving him a once-over. “Or should I say, a date.”
Declan’s mouth opened in surprise. “We…we don’t have a date. I was just bringing cookies by. Besides, we had dinner together a few nights ago.” His cheeks colored. “And…and that wasn’t a date, either. You came over to my house,” he continued rapidly, speaking to me, “and we ate dinner together. Which, I guess, if you want to be technical, could be called a dinner date. But it wasn’t like a date date or anything.”
There was another moment of silence. The rain had tapered off again, and the sky was the color of putty.
“Sounds like a date to me,” Gunnar said lightly.
The headache that had originated with Shawn was threatening to morph into a migraine. I didn’t know what to say or what to do, for that matter.
Two men were at my doorstep. Two men I liked. One had brought me cookies, and one wanted to take me out to dinner. The tension wasn’t high but it was there, an undercurrent I was pretty sure we all felt, and I didn’t know how to diffuse it.
I spoke up. “It wasn’t a date. It was a dinner with a friend.” I shot Gunnar a look. “Not that it matters.”
Declan turned away, focusing his attention on the driveway. “Well, it looks like the rain is finally letting up. I…I should go and let you get to your…your date.”
“I don’t have a date,” I said firmly. “I don’t have any plans with anyone.”
“Yet,” Gunnar said. The word hung in the air.
Declan’s expression clouded, and red raced across his cheeks. “Still
, I should be heading out. I need to work on my Sunday sermon.”
“Wait,” I said.
“No, really, I need to go. I have stuff to do and you have people to…stuff to do, too. I think. I mean, I don’t want to assume, but I’m sure you’re busy and I just wanted to bring you cookies and now that I’ve done that I’m free to go. So…so now I’ll go.”
He smiled nervously at me, gave Gunnar a quick nod, and hustled out to his car, hopping across the driveway to avoid the puddles. Within seconds, his engine purred to life, his headlights popped on, and he was backing out of the driveway.
I sighed. I felt bad for Declan, but I was sometimes at a loss for words around him, especially when he started rambling. It was as if his nervousness took over, and there was no way to get a word in edgewise.
I found my house key and forced the front door open. Gunnar stood where he was, making no move to follow me. Not doing anything, really.
I had my foot halfway across the threshold when he spoke. “I should ask.”
I turned around. “What?”
“I should ask,” he repeated. “I shouldn’t assume things.”
“Yes,” I said. I rubbed my left temple. “You really shouldn’t.”
“Okay,” he acknowledged, nodding. “I’m asking.”
“I already told you,” I said, exasperated. “It wasn’t a date. It was dinner.”
“That’s not the question.” He unfolded his arms and hooked his thumbs in his pockets. He glanced at the weathered floorboard and toed a popped nail with the tip of his boot.
“Then what is it?”
He smiled, and it was one of his whoppers, the big one with the dimples and the twinkle in his eyes. “Rainy Day, will you do me the pleasure of accompanying me to dinner?”
I didn’t know whether to feel flattered or irritated. Gunnar was charming and handsome, and there was a huge part of me that wanted to explore the chemistry that I often felt between us. Yes, there was the logical side, the reasonable Rainy, who warned about what might happen if it didn’t work out—after all, we’d still have to be neighbors—but that Rainy didn’t voice too loud of concern.